something that seems to have happened in the AAA games industry, from my limited armchair op-ed viewpoint, is that the industry doesnāt seem to have ever grown out of masturbating over ever-increasing realism and high-fidelity graphics for the sake of it, even though we probably hit the threshold at which the average player would actually care about realism long ago, and the industry is actively dragging itself down over it. we need to expend absurd hardware resources just to show we Can and that weāre Capable in the current industry and that we arenāt graphicallyātechnologicallyābehind the competition. fuck development costs, fuck the userās storage space, fuck our developers, fuck sustainability
i remember seeing a post about how back in the day the games industry used to like touting graphics because the jump up from an atari 2600 to an nes, or the nes to the snes, were significant, so it was an easy win to say "buy our game, it looks so much better" with better resolutions, colours, etc
fast forward to today where texture resolutions are reaching ridiculous levels and the graphics cards required to run everything and hard drives to store everything are well beyond the reach of most people, but the industry hasn't stopped trying to go for that easy win, couple with the fact capitalism is reaching it's end point where workers don't get paid enough money to buy anything, profits stop increasing, and companies are fervently trying to keep that line going up by any means necessary, and you have executives pushing for higher graphical fidelity hoping it will equate to increased sales
not helped by the hoards of capital g Gamers who get into arguments about graphics, and winge about games not looking "better" than games from the past (even if it's just one fucking year ago)
this is exactly what i was getting atāitās an ever-increasing arms race thatās still managing to sustain itself well beyond anything that shouldāve ever been reasonable. but it is sustaining itself, because the industry has successfully duped Gamers into drinking their kool aid
it's not truly sustaining itself - a war cannot last forever. there must be resources used on every side. ideologies are not immune to entropy
on the other hand, what do you do when the resources run dry?
you change tactics. keep things going well beyond their logical conclusion, no matter the cost
then eventually you will be fighting over a wasteland. then eventually you will become the wasteland. eventually not even the wasteland will be left.
and those who did not fight, who took care of their peoples, their homes, will be affected. but they will survive. they will survive. they will survive.
